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Post Notes Attractiveness of Sex Abuser

If you’re curious about what a terrible lede for a story about the sexual abuse of minors might be, look no further than the New York Post‘s recent feature about Andrew Goodman, who has been charged with abusing two Orthodox boys in Flatbush.

He looks like a movie star, but many members of Brooklyn’s Jewish community believe he is a monster.

The first thing you want to establish in a story about sexual abuse, of course, is the attractiveness of the abuser.

Awful lede aside, the story is actually important and well reported, an examination of sexual abuse in the Orthodox community, where it often goes unreported to secular authorities because of pressure from conservative rabbis. But thanks to a three-year-old program put into place by the district attorney’s office, 85 suspects have been arrested for sex crimes in the Orthodox community. Unfortunately, conviction rates are not so good:

Of the 38 cases closed so far, 14 perps got jail time, ranging from a month to 10-to-20 years for crimes that included sex abuse, attempted kidnapping, and sodomy… The other 24 have walked free. They got probation, pleaded to minor charges, or saw their cases dismissed—often because victims or their parents backed out under community pressure.

One Comment

in the interest of accuracy, this is not pressure from conservative rabbis (conservative judaism follows the “law of the land”, the ultra orthodox community believes it has special dispensation from God to behave as they see fit – they answer to a Higher Authority than flesh and blood officers of the law); it is pressure from ultra observant (and often seriously misguided) rabbis who work hard to keep “their own” out of both the limelight and jail. In offering Andrew Goodman two years with time served for copping a plea this past Friday, the judge basically was telling the “other side” to back off and tend to their own business. Andrew Goodman is not a member of their (warped) community and this case should never have gotten lumped with Hynes’ whole Kol Tzedek initiative which is, imho, just another way to cover up the rampant sexual abuse by people in positions of authority in that community.